Boy, 4, saw girl’s rape, police say — and such stories.

…In a separate development, the NSW Government will consider changing court rules to stop people distorting the trial process following the antics of four brothers convicted of gang rape.

The Premier, Bob Carr, said he accepted comments by the Director of Public Prosecutions, Nicholas Cowdery, QC, that measures to ensure a fair trial had been “pushed to their limits” and may have been abused.

The eldest of the brothers feigned mental illness, sacked various lawyers, threatened the victims’ relatives and revealed prior rape convictions. All four claimed they were victims of an anti-Muslim conspiracy.

But then these guys, assuming the allegations are all true, are simply debased scum, and whatever they may have claimed about being “victims” is a pathetic attempt to hide under the skirts of Mummy Islam, not a proper reflection on the majority of good people of that faith.

And we should not buy their pathetic excuses for a moment. As Geraldine Doogue’s first guest, Dr Anas Altikriti, Iraqi-born president of the Muslim Association of Britain, said this morning, murder, rape, terrorism, and so on are essentially godless and should not ever be prefaced with words like Muslim, Islamic, Christian, or whatever.

He also argued that a little consistency would be nice. We should remember that people blown up in Iraq, for example, whether by the current crop of extremist insurgents, or by US and Coalition forces operating, a couple of years ago, from a distance and from a great height, are as much people blown up as all those of many faiths and backgrounds were in London. Except by some weird moral calculus where “our” deaths somehow matter more than “their” deaths, it’s all the same.

…In an attempt to legitimise its actions, Israel has invoked a language calculated to go down well with the global powers-that-be, such as “terrorists”, “war on terror” and “the Palestinian al-Qaida”. In the midst of all the blood and suffering, the world has managed to offer carte blanche to a government in breach of numerous UN resolutions, to kill citizens whose lands it occupies. And while we condemn without question a suicide attack carried out by a lone Palestinian youngster, we accept the legality and even applaud the courage of a soldier armed to the teeth, firing rocket missiles unto densely populated residential areas from hundreds of feet up in the sky.

The Muslim community in Britain, together with Muslims worldwide, criticised the US-made “war on terror”, not because they somehow condoned or welcomed terrorism. They do not. But at the heart of this staged and false campaign is a grave and dangerous principle. It is the principle that terrorism and bloodshed unleashed by states and elected leaders is somehow excusable and acceptable. It is the principle that might is right, and whoever holds the gun must be the bearer of truth.

If ever an example of state terrorism was called for, Israel unequivocally fits the bill. But the world’s standards continue to be overturned and transformed. As a result, nations linger under occupation, innocent women and children die, and the future of us all is bleaker than ever before.

The Discovery of Global Warming -- hypertext history of how scientists came to (partly) understand what people are doing to cause climate change: from the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics.

Islamophobes please note

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